Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 March 1893 — What Makes Wheat and Cotton Cheap. [ARTICLE]

What Makes Wheat and Cotton Cheap.

I desire to express appreciation of the excellent work done by you during the recent electoral campaign, more , particularly in the clearness with which you have seen and stated the most serious evil which is inflicted upon the people of the West by a protective tariff—the exclusion of their customers from their markets. It is the tariff, and nothing but the tariff, which has kept down the price of wheat, corn, and cotton. The tariff has shut out from us more than SBOO.000,000 of European products every year, for every dollar of which payment would have been made in Western farm products and Southern cotton and tobacco. That it has thus excluded imports to that amount admits of no doubt. Indeed, protectionists boast that it has done so, and bewail the terrible possibility of its abolition for the avowed reason that it would lead to a flood of foreign goods, to this or an even greater amount. And it admits of still less doubt that the admission of these goods would lead instantly to a demand for Western and Southern products to the full amount of SBOO,000,000 a year. This would raise the price of wheat by 30 cents, of corn 20 cents, and of cotton 3 cents. Few advocates of tariff reform have perceived this fact, although it is conclusively proved by the history of all tariff reductions in the past. It is to your credit that you have persistently dwelt upon the effect of tl\e tariff in closing the American farmer’s markets; and I hope that you will continue the work of education along the same lines, until the farmer has an open market in which both to buy and to sell. —Thomas G. Shearman, in St Louis Republic.